Family Hold Back

Family Hold Back is a highly visual darkly comic and very well mannered performance airing the perversities of politeness of the English dinner table where no one mentions politics and everyone knows that Trotterscliffe is pronounced Trosley. It is about being shut up, talked over and con… const… constantly interrupted. Over the three courses of the evening, a leakage of repressed bad manners begins to soak the corners of the pristine white tourniquet napkins as Paris struggles to confront what really lies underneath the perfectly laid table.

Beneath the damask, codes of Englishness are exposed as weapons of mass destruction, as is the ubiquitous silver service canteen. Paris stains, soils and sullies the preserves and codes of the white middle-class, breaking down cultural barriers and mechanisms of polite imprisonment from the inside.

A visual metaphor exposing levels, tiers, hierarchies and centres of control. Paris is spot on.

- Total Theatre, Dec 2004

Family Hold BackSmoking Gun toured nationally and internationally including the Sydney Opera House as part of a 'special relationship' double bill with Smoking Gun, by Leslie Hill.

Funded By Arts Council England
supported by a One to One Bursary from ACE, London and the Live Art Development Agency